By Deke Rivers
Local streaming service Stan might be bubbling over with brand new content, but there are gems galore nestled in its back catalogue of classic TV shows.
If you’ve gunned through new Stan classics like Long Bright River, Ten Pound Poms, Black Snow, Scrublands, and the various bloody offshoots of the seminal Walking Dead series, why not wind it right back to the beginning on some of the greatest TV shows of the modern era? They’re all sitting waiting for you on Australia’s most comprehensive and well-stocked streaming service, ready to watch from their first episode either right to the end, or up until their current cut-off point.
Though previously adapted for the big screen in 1990, Margaret Atwood’s thought provoking and deeply provocative 1985 novel The Handmaid’s Tale was given the wide canvas it truly deserved courtesy of creator Bruce Miller’s award-winning TV series. Starring the superb Elisabeth Moss, this multi-season dystopian drama depicts a warped but disturbingly recognisable future USA that lives under the heavy hand of religious fundamentalism and female subjugation. As exciting and gripping as it is keenly intelligent, The Handmaid’s Tale will chill you to the bone.
After delighting audiences with his consistently goofy comic stylings as the dorky dad on Malcolm in the Middle, veteran character actor Bryan Cranston flipped his image on its head with his iconic turn as Walter White, the harried, put-upon, unhappily married suburban high school teacher who takes a detour into the illicit drug trade and reinvents himself as master criminal Heisenberg. Deliriously twisted, perversely funny, and wickedly inventive, Breaking Bad is nothing short of a television masterpiece, and it literally changed the way that the small screen is seen. You can watch every glorious minute of it on Stan right now.
The sprawling, utterly absorbing story of the political manoeuvring and occasional criminal practices that go into owning and operating a cattle ranch in Montana, Yellowstone is The Sopranos on the range, boasting career-best work from Kevin Costner as the ranch’s hard-punching patriarch, and a gallery of brilliant characters and superb performances. Yellowstone is a classic neo-western in every sense, and is wholly cinematic in its tone and striking visuals. A huge, largely unsung hit that has never drawn critical adoration to rival the likes of Succession, Yellowstone still drew millions of viewers per episode around the world and is a franchise-starter bar none that has inspired multiple spin-offs.
Expertly adapted from the series of novels by British author Luke Jennings, and featuring two of the most compelling female characters to ever front a TV series, Killing Eve is a violently bingeable and delightfully lurid tale of obsession, espionage, madness, murder and perfectly calibrated mayhem. Though the premise is relatively simple – the series tracks Eve Polastri (Sandra Oh), a British intelligence operative tasked with capturing psychopathic assassin Villanelle (Jodie Comer) – Killing Eve moves slyly and with great skill into a whole range of territories that will take even the most seasoned of small screen cineastes by surprise.
With the greenlight just given for a fourth season, the snaking thriller FROM is very much a work in progress, and now is the time to catch up with this white-knuckle ride into the unknown. The series is set in a small, nightmarish town in the United States that welcomes in visitors…but never lets them go. Led by Boyd Stevens (Harold Perrineau), the swaggering sheriff and de-facto mayor of the town, the confused and terrified residents fight to stay alive while horrifying nocturnal creatures swoop in from the surrounding forest as the residents look for secrets hidden within the town and beyond in the hope of finding a way out.
Check out all these great titles on Stan now!!!
